ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the major sociolinguistic concerns of West Africa and to assess whether they corroborate current sociolinguistic theories. A critical examination of sociolinguistic phenomena in West Africa reveals that the sociolinguistic realities in the region challenge many of the existing theories in the field. In sociolinguistic models, language shift is associated with diglossia where domains of linguistic behaviour are boxed into a kind of complementary distribution. All countries in the region maintain the use of a European language as the national or official language that is the exclusive medium of governance, education, mass media and international communication. According to Singh and Connell and Zeitlyn, studies of multilingual situations in West and Central Africa focused on two areas: urban settings and the interaction between indigenous languages and former colonial languages. Another major focus of research in the sub-region has been code-switching. Code-switching is usually regarded as one of the natural consequences of language contact situations.
